Citizen ceremony? Go north. Jury duty? To the south.

I learned today that the person who maintains our Tulsa Organizations and Services database is developing a new LibGuide to help customers navigate the various courts near the Central Library -- city, county, and federal. We often get questions from people about which place they need to go for various services. She decided to do this based on input from a coworker. This is a perfect example of how astute librarians are in tune with the needs of our community and collaborate to fulfill those needs. 
Sheena, library manager

The downtown library in Tulsa is sandwiched between a federal courthouse (and post office) to the north and a county courthouse to the south. The city court where you contest parking tickets is in a weird little pocket nearby. Naturally, that means we often have court-users of all types, from lawyers and judges to jury members to defendants.

It's fairly common to get a family, dressed to the nines and carrying American flags, coming into the library and asking at the desk where the courthouse is. We point to the north and wish them a hearty welcome as new U.S. citizens.

They're the easy ones to direct. (And really gratifying. If you're ever in need of a shot of enthusiastic-but-not-jingo-ist patriotism, you can't do much better than a citizenship ceremony. Those smiles are genuine, and the flag-waving signifies real joy for the opportunities this country gives its people, homegrown or transplanted.)

But then there are the others that are more difficult to help -- frantic people with a court date, but not much of an idea of which court they need. They often thrust crumpled documents at you, confusion and panic marking their faces.

The new LibGuide Sheena refers to will help librarians help folks clear the confusion and get to the right court. It's an amazing piece of work, and I agree with Sheena: it's a great example of librarians (and libraries) responding to the community. (In case you're curious, here's the link to the "Navigating Courts in Tulsa" LibGuide itself: http://guides.tulsalibrary.org/CourtsFAQ)

What is a "LibGuide"? It's a web-based collection of resources on a particular topic or collection of topics. As I see it, a LibGuide is a kind of museum populated with information resources, and librarians are the curators, deciding what books, articles, videos, web sites, basic questions and answers will best help a curious person explore a topic better. In the earlier "Web 1.0" world, they were known as "pathfinders", and this term is still used, but the "Web 2.0" versions promise more multimedia and interactive content.

To get even more specific, "LibGuide" refers to the particular software used to create these collections. For the Tulsa City-County Library, the company is Springshare, and "LibGuides" are what their software helps librarians create.

But that's shoptalk that's interesting only inasmuch as... well, in no way. It's a tool, and only as good as the people who use it. In this case, it's a pretty great tool, and I imagine I will be using it a lot.